America’s Finest News Source has launched Decider, a local entertainment site that includes interviews, event information, and restaurant reviews. The site is initially launching with content for Chicago, with plans to support more cities over the next few months.
The site has a clean (albeit somewhat generic) interface, with integrated Google Maps pinpointing each reviewed restaurant and a calendar for upcoming events. In addition to regular editorial content, users will be allowed to post their own reviews and comments.
The Onion is playing it straight with Decider, so users shouldn’t go in expecting the satirical news stories that have become the newspaper’s trademark. Regular Onion readers will note that the paper has long included legitimate local reviews and event calendars as well as movie reviews (which can be found on sister site A.V Club).
Decider will be facing off with a number of sites, including CitySearch and Yelp, which both have large established user bases that will be hard to compete with. That said, Decider isn’t serving as a standalone business, and will do just fine as an extension to The Onion’s newspaper.
Here in Los Angeles, and I can tell you this for a fact, that city directories are the new MySpace. Everybody and their uncle here is launching one.
They’re actually making money at this. What they do is populate the directories full of generic data from botting Google, then they show this “full” city directory to clients and start racking up the sales.
They are making good money at this.
However, you should always zig when others zag.
Another good trick they pull is hiring people off of craigslist to log in as users on their city directory website and have them post reviews all day at close to minimum wage.
I am sharing some deep trade secrets with you here which I am not under NDA to keep a secret so feel special when you read through.
If they can do what Yelp did and use their witty writers to begin pumping interesting and relevant reviews of restaurants, it could be a hit. If they can establish a cult following like their paper, they have a good chance at hurting Yelp, but probably not CitySearch. My mom and I use Yelp. My grandpa uses citysearch.
Could The Onion pull a significant portion of the loyal culture vultures away from Yelp and hurt their traffic? We’re polling over at tinycrunch.com
Nice poll.
The Onion has local ad sales offices all over the country, so their advantage seems to be that they have ongoing relationships with local businesses. They could provide free adverts on Decider for placing ads in the print version.
Will they get user interest enough to be helpful.
As a long-time lover of The Onion, this is cool to me. I would totally be down for a different opinion on what to do. I don’t think it hurts the space to have another City Search type of site. I’m willing to check multiple places to compare and contrast. It would be cool, though it doesn’t sound like it’s happening, if Decider added a nice dose of The Onion’s awesome humor.
this is a tough space to be in
yelp and citysearch do almost everything already
May the Onion kick some butt with this, but they will need a hook to win. Their Kayak-like Finder feature may be that hook, but Decider will need to add more parameters (e.g., for restaurants, suitable for kids, romance, groups, etc.) to filter by, and more information about each restaurant (see Yelp’s merchant-sourced descriptions).
Citysearch has breadth and a certain level of quality info assured by professional reviews , but its UI still makes every visit into work. Not sure of its user numbers/use patterns, but well-known restaurants there have far fewer results than on Yelp.
Yelp is fun, fast and easy to use, but it is struggling more and more with quality control. It is pretty clear that the site removes reasonable reviews if merchants complain enough (merchant advertising is a key revenue stream for them), and the site’s social features encourage people to preen publicly instead of adding good information for the benefit of other users.
Go Decider!
I guess I just can’t see the Onion taking off with a venture like this but it will be interesting to see what happens!
Will be interesting I’m sure. Anything is possible on the net. The site you look down at today could end up being a hit within a few months time. You never know. That is the fun of observing it. And yeah, you gotta love the Onion.
The Onion makes me literally LOL every day!
“New Galaxy Discovered 4,000 Light Years from Public’s Interest”
Love the new TC look!!
Haha I hope the Onion succeeds in this venture (as long as it doesn’t interfere with their headlines – Our Dumb World (link to ebooks version) is now a fixture on my coffee table). I wasn’t super impressed with the Decider… but then, I always skip over the actual reviews, etc, in the Onion’s actual paper.
So what are they going to do, make up fake reviews that joke about a business? Will be funny but not helpful.
Is CitySearch still in business? I thought it failed years ago.
(Is CitySearch still in business? I thought it failed years ago) Ithink so